Researching, asking, ideating, designing, and testing how HitRECord.org might work better for its members, given its sudden drastic shift to producing TV episodes. Using user research and testing, my preliminary wireframes have achieved >80% task success with existing members.

Introduction

HitRECord.org is an open collaboration production company, combining the online efforts of 350,000 artists around the world to make short films, books, music, and most recently, TV shows.

Given its shifting project type, I sensed a huge opportunity to streamline workflow across the site, to make collaboration easier for the community artists across numerous active projects.

User research and personas

Four persona types emerged from onsite and offsite research into the community

I later started participating more in the site itself, interviewing members individually, speaking with them about their motivations and reasons for passionately participating on the site.

Strategy

From the extensive user research, I came to the following conclusion:

People come to hitRECord to have a safe space to share their artwork with others, and to make art together. Its strength is in being a safe space for artistic collaboration.

In affinity-diagramming the site features requested onsite, I found that most of the requests centered around improving workflow and findability. In addition, there was interest in direct community engagement, artistic growth, and using the site as a hub for official information.

The majority of site feature requests were about improving workflow and findability

User testing the existing workflow

I asked an acquaintance, who had seen “HitRECord on TV” but never been to the site, to do a user test for the current onboarding process. She had a lot of trouble navigating through the different projects and finding something she’d be interested in doing.

Participant doesn’t understand how she can contribute music if “music” is a request but it doesn’t listed anywhere above the fold. She has to watch the entire video first and finds it inconvenient.

Workflow analysis

I then looked into existing workflows, and documented where I could see opportunities to encourage engagement in the community. Here’s one of the whiteboards:

There is lots of opportunities to allow members to explore further and interact with each other

The redesigned dashboard displays more relevant information for the individual user

Production news and official announcements take center stage in the new “From HQ” section

A few reactions from participants:

I loved it. Clear and informative!

Fresh, informative and resourceful.

EXTREMELY ORGANIZED OH MY GOD. Very clean and the interface is much more navigable. The options make it a whole lot welcoming to new artists.

Ideas to improve engagement

The screens above move the project management aspect of the site forward, but more streamlined browsing and communication systems, as well as mobile solutions, have yet to be sketched, wireframed, and tested.

I started ideating ways to encourage more community engagement, one of which is documented here:

More autonomy and self-management would encourage more community engagement

Next steps

I am continuing to converse with members, doing more sketches and wireframing to improve engagement, and plan on doing mini-usability tests on small interactions to improve workflow. With enough interactions laid out between screens, I hope to do some usability testing on the full site workflow redesign with current and new members.